Steven Stewart

Hiii.

There is so much to say about the trip thus far, and having only written one blog I’m afraid I won’t remember any of it at all. As well, I forgot to buy a journal, so that is a problem, although I plan to pick one up at the first chance I get.

Anyways, it appears that the Mongolian population loves to throw dance parties because we had another after the first, and they love music we have on the radio. A lot of mainstream radio music was played, but it was hilarious and amazing. We also ran a cultural night last night to show the Mongolian’s our culture, and it was a great bonding experience. Everyone got to play hockey with the gear we lugged across the planet just for this one moment. I spent most of the event sitting with a group of little boys who had no English and with me having no Mongolian, our means of communication were limited to hand movements and smiles. Even with this, we got along amazing and I have pictures of them so I won’t forget these boys. I played hockey with them and I hope it made their day because it made mine seeing them so happy.

Working is exhausting and sadly we are done and although it will be amazing to tour this country, it’s sad to think this is the last of the work we will do in this city, and possibly the last time I might ever come to Zuunkharaa. It’s a shuddering thought to have, but it isn’t dampening my experience.

To say this was anything less than completely worth the hours of fundraising that we went through beforehand.

Hello.

It’s been a long time since we as a group left Vancouver, and unfortunately the chance to blog has not arisen till recently. I feel like we’ve already done so much that I’ve forgotten some already. But reading other people’s blogs would get a good feel for everything. Sleeping in a cold Ger, Korean flight delays, starting the building, meeting the locals. No matter how wrong things seem to turn out, its always in the right direction. It’s hard to tell that we are in a foreign   in sometimes because the locals here are actually amazing at English. Five or so days have not gone past so fast before, but it’s hard to imagine that there are only ten left.
To talk about the things we’ve done here. We did sleep in cold gers and although it was probably the most miserable night of a lot of lives, once I had settled down( and peed 3 times, I was dehydrated and drank about 3-4 litres that day.) I slept straight through the night. I slept like a baby.  get up, grumble grumble, and relaxed for a bit as the day heated up from the negative twenty five night. I don’t regret bringing the huge rubber boots after this point. The day heated up pretty fast actually and by about ten o clock it was comfortably bearable outside. We played frisbee with the one that Kevin brought.
Took some busses and we moved. We have to adapt: can’t survive in the Ger, we move to the dorms. Work day, and pick axing the ground that is extremely hard. (I’m getting yelled at to hurry up) and now we slept in the dorm that was crowded but warm and amazing.

Theres more but I’m hungry and it’s breakfast.
Miss you, I read to letter five, cause we are a day ahead!

It seems that somethings in life are like a dog running on the prairies: you can see it coming for miles.

This was only more evident today for me at hockey practice: one player on our team has a large ego and, in a stereotypical way, bashes everyone and is praised as cool. One other person on my team, who like the rest of us just let it go, stopped letting it go, as the large ego person had seemed to push it as of recent.During practice this led to a fight on the Ice, which was admittedly cool,( What’s hockey without fights) but the reasons behind it were obvious. Clearly, in the weeks up to this point it was obvious something was going to happen. I could see it boiling in the person’s target and it finally unleashed. Ironically, the big mouth was kicked off the ice and the person who was being insulted, who also instigated was not hampered.

I’m not saying violence was the solution there, but the fact is that this culmination could be seen coming for a long time. For Global, its much the same. We should be able to see things coming before they occur. Although they will hopefully not be continuous insults that lead to physical confrontations but maybe problems that we have to face together, it is no doubt something will occur that we can stop before it happens. Like, if we are building a fire, and we see its heading towards being to big, we should plan ahead and not add more wood, instead of ignoring the problem like what happened in Hockey.

Maybe we as teenagers, and in general, lack this foresight (or hopefully we have it already), but hopefully we will gain it through this trip.

Fix problems before they occur!

This new years was slightly eventful. It all comes back to our silent class. A certain person did not quite understand my choice of actions and I struggled to explain it. Even in the best of my capabilities of articulation, nothing i said went through. It was my fault though; things that make sense in my head rarely do the same for others. If I’ve ever sent you a text message, you know what I mean. It took someone else, who knows me better than most if not all, to explain my actions for this person to understand. At that point, I realized that it’s hard to say you know yourself. You can only picture yourself through your own lens, while other people see you from a different point of view. Maybe that is what will come from this trip: to understand what kind of person I am. Am I lazy? Do I care about others, or do I just tell myself that because that is what is ‘right.’ It’ll all become apparent soon enough, hopefully.

P.S. Thanks Katrina.

It seemed like we had not put much effort towards the bottle drive this second time around. And no doubt it’s true, The pile from our first time was double what we had this time, but we still gathered a staggering 591$. That’s pretty amazing considering how little each separate bottle is worth. We did the sorting after the parent meeting at like 8 on a Saturday (early Saturday…not cool). It went so fast compared to the first time. It was a bitter cold morning with rain but there was only minimal complaining and the work got done. We knew what we were doing and everyone took a role. Situations like this are going to turn up in mongolia because we, at the start won’t know what to do but as the week progresses we will learn and become more efficient. In any case, we were gone in like 30 minutes. Graham hit me in the head with a bag of plastic bottles and it didn’t hurt. Show’s that you have to have fun when you are working or it is torture.

A week or so later we had the collection date. Only like 10 of us showed up to that part, which is alright, it would not have gone any faster, but I’m just hoping that the people who did not come were not free. Because if they did not come because “someone else will do it and they don’t need me” that is very destructive. What happens if everyone thought that way? Then no one would be the someone else? This is like my camping experience two years ago. Whenever something needed to be done, every single one of us, two leaders and four campers, we would say “can somebody bla bla bla blaah?” it would get done but it was funny how we would never specify, but we knew the work had to be done so someone had to do it. Luckily we had enough people to throw the bottles into the truck though.

Yep.

That mispelled word was on purpose, for the record.

I haven’t had my hands in on the formation of this event. Next Friday (come out with your friends!) though, an event for Global Perspectives will be held that wasn’t done previously. I think that’s an amazing amount of initiative on the people who led the organization’s part. I don’t want to name them because I might forget someone and feel bad! All i did was make the tickets, so when you hand it in to get admittance, think of me, and Mongolia of course. But mainly enjoy the show.

As well, it was awfully nice of Tickle Me Pickle and Hello, Sir to provide the opportunity for this to occur. I guess Mr. Matheny was right that it only takes a small ripple to cause a storm.

With mark cut off around the corner, and the web logs being a main assignment worth a big whopping five-zero marks need to be done. Although me pounding off three to meet the minimum through the course of one night seems like just a job to get marks. I’m not very winded when I talk of events we are doing, but not much has happened since the Steve Nash events. Sometimes i just don’t have much to say: A paragraph or two is enough for me. But I’m not just blogging to get marks, i just lack the words to type. It’s hard to explain what I feel I’m getting out of Global Perspectives for myself in words. It’s just a feeling unto myself that I’m doing something important, yet on a small scale. It’s good because it removes a lot of that bureaucratic loss larger institutions face, and it’s amazing that this program is able to be run .

And as much as we say it is about helping others, wise teacher once said, “They will help you as much as you help them”

So far Global Perspectives has mostly been fun and not any work. Class discussions comprised most of our work. But now, projects are piling up: we have a video assignment, a geography map and a data collection assignment piled in. Compared to other classes in IB though, this is lightweight. This keeps the thought though that this is a class worth credits(is it? I’m not sure.) and homework must be assigned. It’s not coming at a very good time in IB terms but it’s no big deal; I’ve learned to not stress about that, there’s always time. Right.

It would be silly to have no assignments for this class though. One of the main stipulations for improving the world is to educate everyone. Youth especially and since I’m youth educating me is important. So really, this is a good thing. Do your homework, it’s good for you. In any case: it’s still fun and not any “work”.

A few days ago, our class performed an experiment where we were each given one of seven(?) roles to fulfill. Some of these roles were clearly negative, such as a saboteur, while others such as flatterer were surprising. Who knew someone who flatters could cause conflict. It was really funny as everyone tried to be their roles and of course, as the experiment tried to show, nothing was able to be done. If these traits were this prominent in people no one would talk to each-other. thankfully these traits aren’t so full blown, but do exist in every person. Each person has parts of each one, and sometimes they go out of balance and it causes problems. These are things we will have to overcome when we spend days slaving away with each-other.

I know myself that I have some of these traits. I like to talk about myself, although i consciously try to avoid it at times. I fit under every category to some extent, and I don’t think changing myself would be productive; that is just who we are, and that’s why my friends are my friends. Because we agree on topics. But Global Ed brings people from every clique in the school into a single room and hopefully we won’t end up falling to pieces because of each-other and we can all be one big happy friendly family.

Another strike at the heart of Evil and everything Bad!

In reality, we volunteered at the Phoenix Sun’s game at GM place for the Steve Nash foundation. and raised 1800$~ for their programs. That’s pretty sweet. the amazing thing is that donations came from every age group: seeing kids donate is quite amazing, that pocket money could have been candy, but instead they give it up to a cause they might not fully understand.

And we saw Steve Nash, isn’t the saying that no good deed goes unrewarded? Although that’s not what we have in our minds, but it’s pretty awesome when it happens. On a side note, i saw the video on his fan page of him dashing to get onto the bus then stopping; i think that was hilarious.

Before that we had the Global Perspectives dinner: great success! We all worked together to fix the kinks and get it to work. Shout out to everyone who helped. They say that the sum of the parts is more than the whole, but each person contributing is so amazing i don’t think that it’s possible, like we reach an upper limit or something.

When I write these i feel so short winded because everyone else’s are so long!